[…] The… oil-fueled boom that energized the suburban expansion of the 1920s brought turmoil and trouble to the farm economy. Thirty percent of the U.… - James Howard Kunstler

Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized… diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children… survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn’t compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland’s oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap labor… of one place, […] was superseded by the cheaper labor… of another place, […] the corporations just moved their operations.

We're living in environments that are punishing us, the immersive ugliness of North American cities can be described as entropy made visible. It's a condition that drives you towards death and stasis. [...] That's what people feel when they go down these miserable boulevards filled with miserable buildings, we need to do better.

There have to be limits. If we project “housing starts” ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there wouldn’t be a single buildable quarter-acre lot left in the world. Not a few economists would rationalize this outcome by declaring that [in] ninety-nine years from now we will have colonies on the moon or Mars or under the . Or that technology coupled with human ingenuity will solve the problem some other way, […] by genetically reengineering human beings to be one inch tall or booting all our consciousnesses into computer servers where unlimited numbers of virtual people could dwell in unlimited virtual environments of endless cyberspace.
More likely, we will remain confined to the planet Earth. Economic growth that has appeared normative and desirable during the story of industrialism is already becoming pathogenic in an economy showing more… signs of positive feedback and accelerating positive entropy manifesting as damage to the biosphere. High entropy becomes particularly problematic in an economy utterly dependent on a few… commodities […]. It becomes especially relevant when the limits to those commodities become tangible, as is now the case as we approach the global oil production peak and the actual depletion (thirty years past peak) of the North American natural gas endowment. But the collective imagination of the public cannot process the notion of a nongrowth economy, even though the limits to growth are visible all around us in everything from the paved-over suburban landscapes to the steeply rising gas prices, to played-out aquifers, to the death of the Atlantic cod fishery. We are not capable of conceiving another economic way. We are hostages to our own system.